The World As We Know It Is Over? 10 Insights on the Movie Biz

2. Adam Yauch on starting an independent distribution company, Oscilloscope Laboratories, during a recession.
Insight: Allow your company to grow at a manageable rate and don’t just rely on traditional marketing to get the word out about your film.
“The time we actually launched the company was just before the economy tanked so that was not actually part of the decision making process. But it actually worked out all right because the company’s already so small and we started looking at picking up inexpensive films and distributing them in ways where we weren’t spending too much on ads and finding other ways to do the press for it… And so far it’s been okay because we’ve been able to ramp up the company in a way that feels like it makes sense with where the economy is at, rather than being in a place where there’s already a company that has hundreds of employees and has to refigure how to deal with people buying fewer DVDs.”

3. Laura Bickford on the innovative VOD distribution model for “Che.”
Insight: VOD may be able to maximize a relatively small marketing budget’s impact.
“On ‘Che’ we couldn’t get a US distributor to be interested while we were shooting because it was in Spanish. And it wasn’t politics like a lot of people thought it might have been. It was that the US distributors make a huge chunk of change on pay television. Pay television deals cover their marketing costs on movies. The more your movie makes at the box office, the more pay television has to pay for it. But it’s only for English-language products. It was a financial reason that they didn’t want to spend the marketing dollars on it. We thought if we went to Cannes and won an award—which we did—that there would be a buyer… Fortunately we ended up with IFC films and approximately one million dollars in marketing money—no money to go to the Oscars—and happily at Landmark and VOD which was fantastic for us. We got to maximize all our marketing dollars by having people be able to buy it at home at a good price at the same time they went to the theater.”

4. Bob Teitel on the announcement of the formation of and speculation surrounding DF Indie Studios.
Insight: If DF Indie Studios is, in fact, real, the formation of an independent production company is a risky move but a hopeful sign.
“It’s like opening a car company now… People were so surprised that during these times a company would come out like that. I know everyone’s trying to figure out if it’s real or not, who’s in it and who’s not. It’s a positive thing if it is real. And I hope it is real for everybody’s sake.”

5. Laura Bickford on the state of the major studios.
Insight: The current distribution model of major studios is simply not sustainable and can not successfully be applied to smaller budget films.
“The reason the studios aren’t doing these [smaller budget] movies isn’t because of taste, it’s because the economic model didn’t work for them. And right now they know they’re on their way down, too. The studios are facing what the music industry was facing. They know that they’re dinosaurs, they know that they’re bloated and they know that they’re going to be over. But they don’t know when and they don’t know what’s going to replace it. Nobody knows how to monetize the internet, nobody knows how monetize video on demand and other forms of that, which is the way of the future shared with the theatrical experience… But they just don’t know where their revenues are going to come from… If we can show them how to make money on smaller budget films they’d be doing it.”

—five more insights from the panel are on page two.—